I grew up in Nairobi watching people make high-stakes decisions with limited information and no access to the kind of advisory infrastructure that wealthy institutions take for granted. No board of advisors. No network of mentors on speed dial. Just instinct and whatever you could piece together yourself. That gap always bothered me. Howard is teaching me to close it. My International Business degree is giving me the frameworks to understand how capital moves, how institutions are built, and how policy shapes opportunity across borders. Pairing that with computer science coursework has given me something more specific: the ability to build. Not just analyze systems, but create tools that change how people interact with them. Howard sits at the intersection of academic excellence and a legacy of producing leaders who go back to their communities. That's not incidental to my education. It's the whole point. What I'm building right now reflects exactly that. The Council is an AI advisory platform I'm developing that gives users access to the strategic thinking of history's greatest minds. The idea is simple: the kind of multi-perspective, high-quality decision-making support that elite institutions have always had access to should not be a privilege. A first-generation entrepreneur in Lagos or a student in D.C. with no connections should be able to stress-test a business idea the same way a Harvard MBA can. Howard taught me to think about who gets left out of powerful rooms. I'm trying to build a door. But I haven't waited to start. At 19, I've already built and scaled e-commerce operations in Kenya that reached significant monthly traffic. I co-founded a community sports lending library to make athletic equipment accessible to kids who couldn't afford it. At BisonHacks this year, I led a team as tech lead with no formal CS degree, stayed up the entire night, and built a product that impressed industry judges. I'm currently writing a research paper examining how public-private partnerships in aerospace concentrate innovation benefits away from the Global South, because I think understanding those structures is the first step to dismantling them. None of that is me listing credentials. It's me showing a pattern: I see a gap, and I move. Howard is sharpening that instinct into something more deliberate. My coursework in macroeconomics and international business is giving me the language to connect local problems to global systems. My involvement in the Youth Lead Men's Initiative is grounding me in the kind of community-level work that matters beyond the product or the pitch. And being at an HBCU during one of the most consequential moments in modern history for Black institutions has made me deeply intentional about what I build and who I build it for. The world doesn't need more people with good ideas who do nothing. It needs builders who understand the stakes. Howard is making sure I'm one of them.

When I think back on my favorite moment at Howard, one stands out above the rest, and I've only been here eight months. A friend sent me a post about a 24-hour hackathon. No prior experience, completely unrelated to my major, less than 24 hours' notice. I signed up anyway. I arrived not knowing what to expect. What I found were computer science majors treating it like a normal Tuesday, and about 120 people serious about winning. Then my team selected me as tech lead. The weight of that hit immediately. For a solid minute I considered walking out. But something in me loved the pressure. I looked at myself in the mirror and repeated: I can do anything I put my mind to. I spent the next six hours building a plan, consulting industry professionals, and drafting a full business proposal. By nightfall, my teammates were burning out. They called it a night. I didn't. We still had an app to build, a demo to run, and a presentation to finish. I stayed up the entire night on nothing but coffee and the desire to win, debugging and implementing until the sun came up. The judges were impressed. Without a demo video, we just missed the podium. BisonHacks taught me more about myself than any classroom had. The pressure, the collaboration, the performance under zero sleep reignited a real passion for building and problem-solving. That's the version of myself I'm bringing to everything I do at Howard.